Since many years, FAO is developing and implementing digital inclusion initiatives, scaling up innovative digital technologies for development and targeted interventions worldwide. Bringing solutions closer to poor households' needs is a direct contribution to poverty reduction and food security, FAO's core mandate, leading the path towards SDGs accomplishment, more specifically SDG1 and SDG2.

ICTs have the potential of maximizing the impact of existing agricultural and rural advisory services, financial services and social protection programmes, facilitating access to markets, information and entrepreneurship opportunities. Taking into consideration these most pressing local and global challenges, the FAO Digital Services Portfolio (DSP) was born.

The DSP is a cloud-based platform aimed at making useful data, information and knowledge in the food and agriculture sector available and accessible as digital services to rural communities, providing them digital agriculture advisories that leverage the knowledge of FAO, Countries, and strategic partners in the mobile world. It targets farmers, fishermen, livestock keepers, traders, extension and nutrition officers in the field.

A flexible platform for opportunities, the DSP builds on four major themes (Weather and Crop Calendar, Livestock, AgriMarketPlace, E-Nutrifood) to improve availability of local con

https://www.fao.org/digital-services/en

• Africa
• Asia and Pacific
• Eastern Europe

• Youth
• Women
• The poor
• Remote and rural communities

The DSP was created to support advisory services in the field in the primary areas of agriculture: weather and crop calendar, nutrition, agri-marketplace and nutrition., initially for use in Senegal and Rwanda, in 2017. It was scaled up at the national level in 2019 and rolled out to Egypt, Tanzania, Zanzibar with integration of early warning systems, Jordan, and now in Iraq, Kazakhstan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

Following a product-based approach and delivering any type of multi-media message or external link directly to the mobile devices of users over the internet, the DSP is meant to be a scalable solution worldwide, to be adapted to all the countries needs and resources and serve local beneficiaries.

The DSP experience is a tailored experience, which makes it replicable, as it enables message creator(s) blend messages originating from global/regional to local sources.

FAO owns and operates the core DSP platform, but Organizations are expected to act as business owners,

A DSP rollout scope is usually at the sub-national, up to the national level. Although the DSP has been primarily used to deliver country-specific advisory messages to farmers, it has the potential to be used more widely thanks to its underlying platform technology, the globally available Cloud Platform.

Two of the key efforts required to successfully rollout the DSP include: identifying information needs; building quality messages with the commitment from partners and the availability, reliability and timeliness of the information provided.
With new collaborations with national authorities, institutes etc in the field to gather, produce and tailor content to specific national contexts, the potential to replicate and scale up DSP implementation in the field is foreseen to deliver relevant digital services and advisories at the right time and to the right audiences.

The tailoring of the app to the deployment context and its inclusive approach with national and local stakeholders contribute to its success through tailored services, answers and information to local needs, for free. Increased downloads in the implementation countries (~153,000), with 50% being returning users, prove their recognition of the app's value.
- In Senegal, ~81,000 people use DSP SMS advisories (+1200 messages in 6 local languages); 10,178 downloaded it.

- In Egypt, El Mufeed was built with inputs from farmers, rural women, local leaders and NGOs. Egypt added specific themes I.e. Citrus Production, Date Palm Production, Healthy Nutrition, Household Poultry Production, COVID-19 food safety (replicated in Rwanda) and a farmers forum platform.

- In Rwanda, FAO trained 7,109 women on agriculture digitalization, focusing on the gender component of digital technologies.

- In Jordan, more projects are underway with schools, universities, farmers´ associations.

- In Tanzania, the Disaster Management Commission of Zanzibar and other stakeholders also selected FAO’s DSP as the food security early warning system for Zanzibar. Five DSP themes were developed: Ulaji Bora (healthy eating), Kilimo Bora (good agricultural practices), Uvuvi na Uzalishaji Viumbe Maji (fishing and aquaculture), Utunzaji Mifugo (livestock keeping), and post-harvest handling.

- In Sri Lanka, upon the Ministry of Agriculture’s request, FAO developed a comprehensive e-extension platfor “Smart Extension and Efficient Decision-making (S.E.E.D) Hub”, reducing vulnerability to climate change and production related risks

- In Kazakhstan, FAO and EBRD partnered with livestock industry associations for Agrokomek, with content on milk production and a unique feature of the animal feed balancing tool

- In Bangladesh, FAO, within its Dhaka Fresh Markets, developed a ''point of interest” theme, functioning like Google Maps, to provide +400markets location/description.

‘The goal of WSIS is to achieve a common vision, desire and commitment to build a people-centric, inclusive and development-oriented Information Society where everyone can create, access, utilize and share information'. Following the WSIS Declaration of Principles, FAO, through the DSP aims at ‘leaving no one behind’, in a human centric perspective for sustainable development worldwide, as the project is a clear example of making information actionable, with targeted results that will help achieving the SDGs by empowering the farmers, and all agricultural stakeholders, including the most vulnerable communities, providing them tools in hands in a transparent, fair and truly accessible manner, so that everybody can access, use and share all the information they need related to food and agriculture easily and make therefore the best choices and decisions to improve not only their production and consumption, but also consequently their livelihoods. FAO stands thus committed to provide the ‘efficient mechanisms for multi-stakeholder implementation of WSIS Action Lines', here in particular AL C7 on E agriculture and work towards the concrete realization of ‘cross-cutting commitments on gender equality’(bridging the digital gender divide), ‘information exchange, knowledge creation, and the sharing of best practices' which are the main objectives of the WSIS forum. The DSP that FAO supports, and as showcased by the most recent collaborations in the field that benefit its scaling up, has the potential to provide assistance in the field in developing multi-stakeholder and public/private partnerships to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals’. FAO aims at strengthening this approach with the new vision of the DSP product to be taken to the next stage in 2024 and further promoted in FAO community and all its partners, as DSP platform and its technology can also be used in other SDG domains for strengthened information and knowledge dissemination..